ANU photographers feel the Lens Love

Lens Love: the tender gaze of six Canberra region photographerswill showcase works by the ACT’s top photographers when it opens at the Canberra Museum and Gallery this week. And each and every one of them has a connection with the ANU Photography Workshop. 

Marzena Wasikowska, 'Jess, Danny and Mia, 2010,' (detail).

The exhibition, which is part of the Canberra Centenary program, will explore the unusual and stirring connections between personal identity, history, place and myth, with photos from in and around Canberra over the past thirty years.

Curator Shane Breynard, Director of the Canberra Museum and Gallery and ANU School of Art graduate and University Medalist, says he has selected works which show great empathy for their subjects.

“The main focus of the exhibition is that they’re photographers who’ve worked in lens-based practice for decades now, and they bring a real sensitivity to their artwork and the way we view photos.

“There are a number of artists who have photographed their own family or people in the communities they grew up in, like John Reid, who has a great tenderness for the forests of South East New South Wales, which you can see in his images.”

The six photographers featuring in Lens Love are all graduates or current staff of the ANU School of Art Photography and Media Arts Workshop.

Martyn Jolly, Head of Photography and Media Arts at the ANU School of Art says the Workshop has been an important component of the ACT creative landscape for many years, and this exhibition is testament to this.

“The School of Art Photography and Media Arts Workshop is part of the ecology of creative photography in the ACT, through training undergraduate students, supporting ACT photographers in their development, and also providing employment in our Inkjet Research Facility.”

The exhibition features Martyn Jolly’s series Faces of the Living Dead, which he produced after research in Cambridge University in 2001, as well as his photographic documentation of a commission to design and build the ACT bushfire memorial with two other ANU artists.

Other photographers featured in the exhibition are Denise Ferris (Head, ANU School of Art) John Reid (Lecturer, ANU School of Art), and Marzena Wasikowska, Lee Grant and Cathy Laudenbauch (all graduates of the ANU School of Art).

The exhibition runs from Saturday 30 November 2013 until Sunday 23 February 2014.